Bhutto Wins Plurality and Faces a New Struggle

By EDWARD A. GARGAN,

Published: October 8, 1993

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Oct.7—
After battling for more than two years to regain the job that was taken away from her in 1990 on charges of corruption and incompetence, Benazir Bhutto appeared today to be on the brink of triumph to return as Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Ms. Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party captured the most seats in the nation's new 217-member Parliament that was elected on Wednesday, although she fell short of a majority and now faces the task of wooing small parties into joining her in a coalition government.

Her party won 86 of the 200 parliamentary seats that were up for election, compared with 72 won by the Pakistan Muslim League of her opponent, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. But refusing to admit defeat, Mr. Sharif began a frenzied effort to recruit 22 independently elected parliamentarians to thwart Ms. Bhutto's comeback.

"Now the real game begins as to who forms the government," said Ayesha Jalal, a professor of history at Columbia University said in a telephone interview from New York. "I think she'll be able to form a government, but it will be a very weak government. The establishment -- the bureaucracy and the army -- will have a very strong hand." An 'Unhappy Situation'

That assessment was echoed by Sherry Rehman, managing editor of The Herald and a Bhutto supporter.

"It's a very unhappy situation," Ms. Rehman said. "If Nawaz Sharif or if Benazir had come up with a chance of forming a stable government, they would have needed a majority. Now we will see another unstable government. More power jockeying is what I see. There is no question of addressing the larger issues."

Since Pakistan was founded 46 years ago, political horse-trading has tarred the country's political process in a high-stakes bidding war involving huge cash payments, promises of ministerial posts and other acts of favoritism. Even so, Pakistan's history of coalition governments has been an unhappy one. And it seems certain that rather than returning to political stability, Ms. Bhutto's plurality victory insures more uncertainty for a country with desperate social and economic problems.

Ms. Bhutto herself had little to say today beyond complaining loudly and repeatedly about what she said were election irregularities.

"We are unhappy with the manner in which tampered electoral lists were provided in a majority of constituencies," she said in her home in Larkana, in the southern province of Sind. "Our voters were turned away." Few Registered to Vote

But teams of observers from 40 countries who watched Wednesday's elections at polling stations across the country reported no serious irregularities. Indeed, the general impression today was that the elections, which were carried out under military supervision, was the freest and fairest election since 1970, although one in which fewer than 40 percent of the country's registered voters cast ballots.

The elections pitted Ms. Bhutto against Mr. Sharif, both of whom made no secret of their intense dislike for each other. For more than two years after her dismissal from office, Ms. Bhutto waged a nonstop campaign against Mr. Sharif, a former industrialist from Lahore. She frequently asserted that Mr. Sharif conspired with Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who was President then, to drive her from office and rig the elections of 1990 that propelled Mr. Sharif into the prime ministership.

The prime ministership had since been single-mindedly pursued by Ms. Bhutto, the daughter of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a tyrannical socialist who ruled Pakistan in the early 1970's and who was executed in 1979 after a military coup in 1977. And when elections were called in July, Ms. Bhutto describe them as a victory for her party.

Earlier this year, when Mr. Ishaq Khan dismissed Mr. Sharif from office on similar charges of corruption and incompetence, Ms. Bhutto sided with President Ishaq Khan. When the Supreme Court restored Mr. Sharif to office, senior members of Ms. Bhutto's party let it be known that they would even support a military coup if it drove Mr. Sharif from office. The Glamour of Bhutto

When the powerful military establishment forced the resignation of both Mr. Sharif and Mr. Ishaq Khan and ordered new elections in July, it was able to end the country's political and constitutional crisis that resulted in part from Mr. Sharif's battles with the President and from Ms. Bhutto's threats to march on the capital with hundreds of thousands of supporters.

The electoral achievement of Ms. Bhutto, a striking, almost glamorous woman in a deeply male-dominated society, appears to be testimony more to her phenomenal campaign personality before a mostly illiterate electorate than to any of her party's policy pronouncements. Indeed, there is little in Ms. Bhutto's campaign literature to distinguish her program from that of Mr. Sharif.

But some foreign experts say they believe that both Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Sharif, if he somehow manages to outwit his opponent in the search for parliamentary allies, will be constrained in their policies by the radical changes that have been introduced in the two-month-old administration of the interim Prime Minister, Moeen Qureshi.

After assuming office in July, Mr. Qureshi moved swiftly to expose political corruption, crack down on drug traffickers who had long been tolerated by the political establishment, jettison expensive and foolhardy government spending and introduce a measure of fiscal probity to government. Farm Tax Is a Target

Both Ms. Bhutto, 40, and Mr. Sharif, 44, have criticized Mr. Qureshi's policies, and Ms. Bhutto has said that she will repeal an agricultural tax that he imposed on rich landowners like herself.

"Moeen set a standard that is very difficult to withdraw from," said Paula R. Newberg, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served as an election monitor in Pakistan. "He ran the place with a Cabinet of six people. If she lets the agricultural tax lapse, there are a lot of people in this country who will consider that the People's Party is still a prisoner of feudal interests."

Ms. Newberg continued: "This interim government came in initially to provide a bridge to a new government, but in the process undertook a series of policy initiatives which served to expose the political establishment as very self-interested, and rather uninterested in the plight of their own constituents. At the same time, it was designing a process for free, fair and direct elections to re-elect these same people. It leads one to ask what the prospects are."

Ms. Rehman of The Herald said the coming days were crucial to Ms. Bhutto's goal of forming a government, with Paraliament expected to convene this month and select a prime minister

"Nawaz Sharif seems very ready to go into battle," she said. "He seems to think he can form a government. This is not going to be easy for Benazir."

But despite clear signs of strain among her political advisers, Ms. Bhutto sounded confident this evening before leaving for Lahore. "The people have given their verdict," she said, "and they have given their verdict in favor of the Pakistan People's Party."

Photos: Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was joined by her son, Bilawal, as she awaited election results yesterday in Naudero, Pakistan. (Agence France-Presse); Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, surrounded by supporters in Lahore, refused to admit defeat for his Pakistan Muslim League. (Reuters)